From a categorization perspective, I feel creating particular sites for each aspect of religion eats up needless room, and spreads the religious answers thinner than they need be. I'm not going to exaggerate and bring up every minority religion's lack of representation, and every biblical text, but I would have expected that having one site would help form more cohesion in the community, especially since religion is a very synergistic subject. The crossover knowledge from religion to religion would be impressive to see.

I would have expected there to be one religion site, that used tags to identify which religions/issues were involved in a particular answer.

Has this been discussed?

... Is the community afraid of locking different religions into the same site? ;)

Can you really see people getting on on one site?
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ChrisFNov 10 '11 at 13:32

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Practically speaking? I think that every religion has fringe fanatic groups that are over highlighted, but the majority of people would be fine. travel.stackexchange.com manages to keep itself from imploding.
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BobNov 10 '11 at 13:43

@Bob - You should look at the discussions on the separate sites. Jewish people will not normally be interested in questions about any Sura any more than most Muslims would be interested in the latest Halacha about washing hands. The different religions have much minutia that would be of little interest to those of other religions.
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Oded♦Nov 10 '11 at 13:46

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By the same token someone using ajax with PHP could care less about the latest Ruby question, and yet stackoverflow seems to get on well enough.
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BobNov 10 '11 at 13:48

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Yes, and the (language) religious wars need to be quashed, as soon as someone tries to start one. Religion, however, tends to stir emotions much more than choice of programming language.
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Oded♦Nov 10 '11 at 13:51

Use Macs vs PCs if you wish then ;). It sounded like a good idea to me, but if I'm the only one who thinks this is feasible then I'll concede to the greater knowledge of the community.
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BobNov 10 '11 at 13:53

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@Bob - I grew up in Jerusalem. Can't say I am an authority, but trust me on this one ;)
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Oded♦Nov 10 '11 at 13:56

This is just asking for trouble - would this site also merge with atheists.stackexchange.com and trolls.stackexchange.com?
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Paul BelloraNov 10 '11 at 14:08

+1 for the interesting question, but I'm with the rest that it's asking for flame wars.
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GUI JunkieNov 10 '11 at 14:13

I'm impressed that so many people have opinions about this, but not one person has answered. I suppose that says something in itself. It's a sobering thought to think that mankind still has so far to go.
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BobNov 10 '11 at 14:27

2 Answers
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What does it mean that a site "eats up needless room?" — In an academic sense, it would be nice to see everyone collaborating on the world's religions… but those you listed are not academic sites.

They are not interchangeable subjects you might pick and choose between based on the context of your problem (like choosing a programming language on Stack Overflow). The members of these communities aren't interested in the local catch-all "religion expert" to weigh in on their deeply-held religious beliefs. These are applied sites, not tags under some academic "world religion" study.

Sites and their subjects are formed around communities; communities with common goals, problems, and interests. The Christians and Jews on those sites want to consult and commune with those who are of the same teachings and belief system.

In the blog post Merging Season, Joel came up with a set of rules to see if is site X should be subsumed by site Y. So let's substitute "Christianity" for (X) and "Judaism" for (Y), and see if this marriage of subjects sounds like a good match.

Here’s the best we could come up with for deciding whether X [Christianity] should be subsumed by Y [Judaism]:

Almost all Christianity questions are on-topic for Judaism.

If [a subject for] Judaism already exists, it already has a tag for Christianity, and nobody is complaining

You’re not creating such a big group that you don’t have enough experts to answer all possible questions

There’s a high probability that users of Judaism would enjoy seeing the occasional question about Christianity.

The missive above doesn't sound workable to me, but whether you agree or not with that technical assessment, there is still one incontrovertible problem: Users seeking answers to their deepest "expert" questions on Judaism (or Christianity) are not going to show up on a generic "religion" forum — And site is not much good to a group of users if they will not show up.